Econet Wireless Zimbabwe has appointed Fayaz King as its new chief operating officer. He replaces Stan Henning, who resigned the position.

Prior to assuming his latest role, King worked in several key positions in telecom throughout Africa. These included an advisory role at Bharti Airtel International, as MD of Airtel Zambia, MD of Zain Malawi, marketing director of Celtel Uganda, as well as in general management roles at Celtel Nigeria.

Information Memorandums (IMs) are understood to have been issued to prospective bidders for Zain Group’s tower assets in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. The documents were reported to have been sent out to bidders earlier this month. Zain is hoping to sell around 2,000 towers in Kuwait and 6,500 in Saudi Arabia, and hired Citi and Hardiman Telecommunications to run the process earlier this year. Zain is also hoping to sell around 1,000 towers in Sudan.

IHS Holding this week confirmed that it has signed and completed the second tranche of the Etisalat Nigeria transaction announced on August 7, 2014.

In a statement the company clarified that this portion of the transaction includes the transfer of 555 towers, which are in addition to the 2,136 sites transferred a year ago.

The transaction is said to be part of the broader strategy to drive improvements in the quality of Etisalat’s network performance and to accelerate the roll out of 2G, 3G, and 4G coverage throughout Nigeria.

IHS says that following completion of this transaction, the company will manage over 15,500 towers in Nigeria and over 23,100 towers throughout Africa.

IHS has also confirmed that on the back of continued deployment of solutions and investment in energy sources, by the end of 2016, 80 per cent of all the company’s towers will be run on hybrid solar solutions.

Turkcell is reported to be conducting a preliminary review regarding participation in a tender for the management of state-owned mobile networks in Lebanon, it said in a statement.

Lebanon currently has two operators: Touch (Zain) which has 52 per cent market share, and Alfa, which has the remaining 48 per cent.

Google has announced the separation of its search and advertising business, YouTube, and the Android and Chrome operating systems from its more experimental activities using a new corporate structure.

A holding company called Alphabet will manage the established businesses alongside separate companies for its other, less profitable activities, said CEO and founder Larry Page in a blog.

These include a myriad of initiatives including Nest, driverless cars, smart cities, health initiatives, fibre networks, drones and balloons.

Alphabet will be run by Page and co-founder Sergey Brin, who becomes president of the new holding company, alongside CFO Ruth Porat.

The new Google subsidiary will be led by Sundar Pichai, who is currently the company’s SVP of products.

Each of the other businesses within Alphabet will have their own CEOs, all reporting to Page and Brin.

The search giant argues the move will provide more visibility to investors. “Our company is operating well today, but we think we can make it cleaner and more accountable,” wrote Page in his blog.

On the other hand, some investors had become unhappy about how costs on more speculative business (the so-called moonshoots) were buried in the results.

The new structure also provides more autonomy for individual CEOs to build their businesses.

The company plans to introduce segment reporting in its Q4 results, where Google financials will be provided separately than those for the rest of Alphabet. However, this means only Google and Alphabet will disclose numbers, not any other individual businesses.

Alphabet will replace Google as the publicly-traded entity and all shares of Google will automatically convert into the same number of shares of Alphabet, with all of the same rights. Google will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Alphabet, which will trade under the existing stock tickers, Googl and Goog.

In another shift in responsibility, Omid Kordestani, Google’s current chief business officer, will act as an adviser to Alphabet. Tony Fadell, who runs Nest, will report directly to Page and Brin, and will lead hardware efforts.